End of an Era

[CINDERS]

In our industry we have had a plethora of the churn & burn dogman/riggers/crane drivers providers offering 5 day tickets one would hope most come from an industry background like construction as when I went into it I was just a labourer operating a hand shovel, pick axe & crow bar but improved my position by private classes night schooling though after a 12 hour day it was pretty difficult.

But what I saw from on the ground and being in the cranes was more often than not young ppl who had their quals but not the industry grass roots experience and when your dealing with cranes and loads then the propensity for accidents is magnified if your not onto it.
It's easy in the training yard to sling up 4 round pipes or calculate & sling a square 2m x 2m x 12mm plate but get onto site where there is a whole lot happening other cranes etc and it ramps up where I could I got out of the crane and helped them obviously as I'm in charge of getting the loads safely there, but some were just too much of a risk.
I usually talked to them and said see if you can get on a wobbly crane (BHB or Franna) to gain more experience in slinging they all want to please and show skill but that comes with time on the job not 5 days in a yard.
To many of our workers never come home from the job and that's sad I was on one site for 30 months with 3,000 workers on site and in that period there were 3 deaths on site (One was from the company I was with) then 1 more as a MVA coming to site so 4 in total.
One chap it was his first day on the job had a momentary lapse trying to do the right thing fell 15 meters head first onto concrete, he was married with 2 little children and it hurts as your all there together we took up a collection $20/head but it wont bring them back.
I blame the churn & burns for exposing ppl to a very high risk occupation without any real aptitude for nutting things out on the fly or recognising through experience the potential risks or how to safely sling unevenly weighted loads and out of shape loads.
Just recently DOSHWA went through one provider and pretty much shut them down for falsifying ppl's abilities through back handers and passing them when they clearly failed!